


Bouquet

by JulyStorms



Series: Before Colors Broke into Shades [27]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-28
Updated: 2015-02-28
Packaged: 2018-03-15 16:56:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3454754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulyStorms/pseuds/JulyStorms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This isn’t a goddamn funeral.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bouquet

**Author's Note:**

> I received this prompt so long ago I don't have the message anymore, but it's written on my WIP list and I felt inspired to fill it. The original prompt was: "Hange and Levi's wedding" and it was requested anonymously on Tumblr. I know this is definitely not what you were thinking of, but I like how it turned out, so here you go.
> 
> Takes place after Chapter 65 of the manga.

There are flowers in the chapel courtyard. They’ll have to do.

Will they serve a funeral or a mismatched scatterbrained wedding—the only kind of wedding they’ll ever have in the end, anyway?

It’s fine. He’s never known anything but _less than_ , has he? People like him—like them?—they don’t get to have an organized clean affair.

Well, at least there’s a church.

At least there are flowers.

What’s that stupid phrase? Something old/new/borrowed/blue?

Yeah. They have that, too, don’t they? Their uniforms are old, knowledge is new, the bandages wrapped haphazardly around Hange’s shoulder are borrowed from Armin’s torn shirt, and blue—well, her veins are blue, stark against the too-pale skin of her hand.

He watches it for a moment. _“That’s blood rushing through there_ ,” he hears her say—some distant memory, the context of which has been long forgotten.

It means she’s fighting, right? He can’t picture her giving up. He can’t picture her quitting. She’s never quit—no matter how bleak things looked, no matter how shitty their situation was, and he knows she’s not about to quit now.

This isn’t a goddamn funeral.

He doesn’t want it to be.

He’s seen too many of those—what feels like a hundred funerals. He’s never seen a wedding.

He doesn’t really _care_ about weddings. They’re happy affairs, though, he supposes, and he’ll take that over the alternative, which involves tinder and the smell of burning flesh—or if she’s lucky, a lot of digging; she’d like that, wouldn’t she, him having to get all dirtied up for her sake?

He won’t give her the satisfaction.

He won’t let her laugh at him from the afterlife, from somewhere he can’t fucking see or reach.

He can’t die until he’s used up, and he doesn’t know when that’ll be. Maybe tomorrow, maybe ten years from now.

This is a wedding in a country chapel courtyard; the long grass is slick with Hange’s blood, and the last desperate wildflowers, slightly brown around the edges, bend in the sorry excuse for a breeze as it passes. A sorry bouquet for a church wedding, but it’ll do.

In attendance are a bunch of child soldiers.

He lifts her goggles, an ugly cracked veil, over her eyes and sets them in their familiar place atop her messy hair.

He doesn’t bend to kiss her.

He doesn’t say _“I do.”_

He touches her hand, traces the bluish line of her vein down the back of it, and then touches her face: the slope of her nose and her bruised cheek and the corner of her mouth.

And he _thinks_ —as if thinking can reach her, somehow. _We’re married now—right now. I don’t care that we both look like shit. We don’t need vows. This is between us. The point is that you don’t leave someone you’re married to because you made a goddamn promise. ‘Til death means you have to fight death, you got that, shitty-glasses? If you fight your way back, I’ll—_

As if _thinking_ can force her to fight harder to stay with him when he _knows_ the easy fucking route is to leave everything behind.

But Hange’s never taken the easy road in her entire life, has she?

That’s the hope he clings to: that she’ll fight for him—for this shitty wedding he’s thinking at her where she gets a browning bouquet of wildflowers and whatever he has left of himself to give her.

It’s not much.

He _knows_ it’s not much.

And it’s true that she deserves more than this. But it’s all he has, and he hopes that this time it’ll be enough to tempt her back.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my 50th SnK fanfic on this site! :)


End file.
